3 ms·
The feedback is something that a couple of friends of mine and I are working on. There are a few things that we've talked about are: 1) Heat. Patches that ca
by blhack 14y ago
The feedback is something that a couple of friends of mine and I are working on.
There are a few things that we've talked about are:
1) Heat. Patches that can be placed on areas of your skin that will increase/decrease heat quickly as a way of giving forece-feedback. This was just something we talked about briefly, and I really don't know how workable it is. I don't know offhand of any materials that can rapidly go from hot to cold and back again.
2) Electrodes. This is difficult because skin conditions change. There is [from what we've looked at] a smallish envelope between "I can feel this" and "this is potentially dangerous". The envelope can change with skin conditions [and people]. I've built a little prototype that sits on my tongue and gives me feedback, but that is clunky, and something we'd like to avoid.
3) Vibration. The problem here is that it turns out that it's a bit tough to judge different levels of vibration. It ends up as an on/off sensation. What we've talked about is using different patters of on off, or a variable frequency of on-off. (Here is one of the motors walking through the different freqs. It sounds kindof funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_bGb2Xij8I&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_bGb2Xij8I&feature=youtu...)
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There is a ton of interest in this stuff, at least in my circle.
- jplewicke 14y agoWhat about vibrating motors placed in different locations? I've always been intrigued by this kind of vibrating compass-belt: http://www.gradman.com/hapticcompass http://www.gradman.com/hapticcompass .
- blhack 14y agoHa! A friend of mine built something exactly like that for blind people [not for judging direction, I think for judging proximity to objects]. Haptics is a really awesome field that I feel is going to be really really important moving forward with some of this new HCI stuff.
- blhack 14y agoI can no longer edit, but if anybody is curious what the prototype "zapper" thing looked like: http://thingist.com/t/item/20483/ http://thingist.com/t/item/20483/ This was something I put together over an evening, so it's really rough (just a PoC). What I was actually doing here was tying the electrodes to different events on my webserver. The idea here being that the "force feedback", could indicate to me how much traffic was hitting different areas. I almost constantly tail -f /var/log/apache/access_log. This was supposed to be a wearable version of that :). (The project, for me, changed a bit after this. What I'm working on now is a general purpose haptic device that can be tied to arbitrary inputs around your environment)